go west, paradise is there
by FigureofDismay
Summary: And exploration of Wishverse Buffy and Giles. Buffy survived the Master, but has lost everyone close to her over the last four years as the Slayer. Giles saved Canonverse but will never know the fate of that other timeline or see it himself. The Hellmouth is freed from the Master's control but might not be stable. There's a lot of baggage to deal with. And all they have is the real
1. welcome to sunnydale

**_I have a clear image of this thing, but i've never been able to judge how long it will take to say the things which Must Be Said in a story. My first estimate was around 15K but I can tell already that is very much not enough room for this tale. I fear to hazard a guess, in case I curse myself lol_**

 ** _Hope you guys are interested in dark, moody, prickly, grief-stricken AUs? seriously though, tell me what you think!_**

* * *

The Master died. It was only a stroke of luck, but no fight she walked away from alive was a dishonor. Another tangled knot of combatants tumbled into into them at the right moment to break the great Vampire's cold, doughy grip on her skin and she was able, in the confusion, to plunge her stake into his back. Before she knew it she was looking down at a pile of the Master's bones. An old one then, very old, even Lothos hadn't left bones, and neither had Beauregard, or The Great Wolf. What stupid, grandiose names these elder vampires chose.

After that it was just a matter of disposing of the minions. And sending off the survivors. And calling in emergency services for the wounded, and seeing they hung on until she could hear sirens from the road. It was a hard evening's work. The slight young man with the spiky red hair helped her with the last couple of those, seemingly inured to the violence around him. He was capable and didn't make a fuss. Buffy liked him, and was glad he had lived.

He thanked her at the end, and told her that his name was Oz and that he and the librarian and some of the others had formed a little group to do what they could.

"If you need anything while you're here, we can help you out," he said. "Go to Giles. He looks out for us."

Oz got into an ambulance with a slender brown haired girl who had been one of the prisoners, the girl on the stretcher and the solemn faced boy ushered off by the shell shocked and grim looking emts. No police had shown up to ask questions. The road as she walked away was as deserted as the end of the world. This town is creepy, she thought, there's something so wrong in the air.

The stars were out though, the sky country-clear and high and dark. Not like LA, not like Chicago, not like Cleveland. Sunnydale was a tiny patch of houses and grocery stores and strip malls and a small town center, and an industrial area clustered around a small Port, a few skeletal cranes looming in the skyline by the abandoned factory. Lompoc was north of here and Santa Barbara south, but Sunnydale was in the middle of nowhere. She'd had to take a greyhound up from LA, and she hated busses, and LAX, and passing through the scenery of her past life, all of which made her predisposed to dislike the place. It was pretty and quaint and touristy, though, if it hadn't been rotted out from the inside by its vampire overlord, she would have thought it a nice place to take a break. There was a metallic tang in the air that left a taste on the back of her palette, a sensation she associated with a high concentration of magickal working or places of power. Not a pleasant feeling yet always thrilling or stirring, like a realization under her skin, like restless static.

It was unusual and pervasive enough that she wanted to stay and investigate even though the Master was slain. Reggie probably wouldn't go for the idea, but she had sent Buffy off to fight alone while she stayed home, so Reggie would have to learn to live with the disappointment.

She walked the deserted alleys of the industrial area, and the equally deserted streets of the town center. The shops were grilled and barred, the lights were all off. It couldn't have been later than 9 in the evening, but the whole town had locked up and gone to bed, or were huddled inside their dark houses like it was curfew at wartime. Sensible, she thought, what more people should do when there was a vampire King in town, but not something she'd ever seen before. Even in Cleveland the civilians were so ignorant of the dangers of the putative 'hellmouth' on top of the grubby little demon king that had been running his little gang, that no one had altered their habits. No one on the streets, anywhere she'd been before, had a clue what she protected them from. The veil of unknowingness seemed unnaturally thin here, in this quaint seaside town, these people weren't ignorant, they were scared. Just what was this place?

The lights in the spanish style courtyard to the Not-Watcher's small house burned warm and brave. Jeeves, she though, Giles, who talked with a wild light in his eyes about an amulet, a better world, a second chance. Whatever he'd done while she killed the Master hadn't winked them all out of existence. In spite of her skepticism, though, she didn't think he was like those 'experts' she'd met whose minds had turned and fermented from too long living in the dark. She didn't think that light she'd seen was the light of madness. She hoped he was still alive.

His door was unlocked. She had a moment's vision like premonition, that was memory, that was other scenes behind other ominously unlocked doors, the dead, the smell of the dead, former-people in various states of violent disassemblage. Something lurched and jarred in her chest. She put her cold palms on the door and hesitated. Slayer do thy work, she intoned within her head, as Linus used to say. It was Linus's voice she heard, though he'd only spent a year with her. She'd found him behind a door too.

Inside, all was calm. The lights were on. The place was a mess, papers and book everywhere, and a faint tang of the recently burnt, but over that the floral and bitter scent of bergamot tea wafted, not the scent of death. The Watcher sat on his couch, at ease. He looked up at her entrance but didn't go on guard. He eyed her with frank, exhausted curiosity but not suspicion.

"Hello," he said, "I didn't think you'd be back."

"You should lock your door," she snapped, bitten off with anger she couldn't place.

"No need," he said calmly, "I have wards. I invite no one in. Better that my friends can find shelter should they need it. They have needed it frequently of late."

"Yeah, well. I killed your monster. So that's done. Crisis over, yada yada, all quiet on the western front."

At this, he stood and tracked her path as she walked into his living room. He moved with the lassitude of slow belief, or of exhaustion, or maybe of drink.

"The Master is slain?" he asked. He used the Watcher-approved term for the final death of an undead thing. He didn't ask like he didn't believe she could do it, but like he couldn't believe such a thing could be done.

"Yep. Killed. Slain. Slew. Whatever. He's a big ol' pile of dust and bones now. The minions are either dusted or fleeing, too."

"That's… that's incredible. Well done, Buffy, that's fantastic. Oh my. The Master is gone. Do you mind if I ask how you…?"

"Stake through the heart," she said with a shrug, "Works just as well as on the less wrinkly and gross variety."

"Right."

The Watcher stood quietly for a while, lost in thought, of maybe studying her. She thought about what the Oz kid had said. She wondered if she should ask him for a place to crash, and if she did, if he'd take it as a signal or a sign. If he'd send her to a motel or put her on his couch, or offer her his bed, and if it was that last one, if he would expect to be in it or not. Buffy didn't know what she hoped. He was fortyish, tall, very tall, and broad shouldered, nice looking in a proud, raw boned way, a face that could have been mean but instead was kind. He was also scruffy, rumpled, pale, slouching and apparently dead on his feet. She didn't think he was going to make a pass, not in that state. Plus the Watcher training probably meant he wasn't planning on it later. Watchers were kind of like monks. Some of them drunken, irascible or vindictive monks, but still. Celibate, cloistered, superstitious and monk-like. Probably ex-watchers were the same.

Giles looked speculatively down at the jade glass mug he was holding, nodded, set it back on the table and then straightened, facing her squarely. He was suddenly alert and focused. About to prove her right or wrong, she thought. What he said was not what she expected.

"We have to go and retrieve those bones," he said.

"What?"

"The Master's bones," he said urgently, "We must take them, bury them or destroy them and bless the ground or his disciples may call him back to rise again."

"The guy's dead, the gang is in the wind. Vamps aren't that loyal. I've killed kings before, the gangs never stick around to mourn. They scatter or they pick a new head evil. That's it. No encores. "

"This one was unusual," said Giles with a gesture of his hand, emphatic and soft spoken. "His… his mesmeric powers over those of his kind were strong, perhaps amplified by the Hellmouth. He spent a hundred years stuck in a pocket created by the seal of the portal, and still his followers did not desert him. It was as much a cult as a.. 'gang.' We cannot take the chance that their loyalty still holds."

Hellmouth, she thought, if those things are real, then seem to be a lot more common than anyone likes to believe.

"Okay," she said, "I walked around for a couple hours patrol, so if those minions really wanted them, they could have taken them already. But whatever. If it means that much to you, I'll burn some bones with you. But you're driving."

"Of course."

"You are okay to drive, aren't you? There wasn't whiskey in that mug, right?"

He smiled a tight, blank, wry public school boy's smile. She recognized it from Linus. The polite, droll look wore differently on this man, with his funny, angular, northern face and his scruffy chin and his ridiculous height. Something like a working wolfhound who knew how to fetch your slippers and bring the paper. Slightly comic, an endearing but surprising juxtaposition.

"I am quite alright. My car and my mind are sound. Though I suppose you are well to ask," he said graciously, with humor, "And my tea and brandy really was mostly tea. It would be a waste of a decent brandy, otherwise."

How did he find the energy to be gracious, to joke and not snap? Reggie would have growled at her for aspersions cast, while also being almost certainly not okay to drive. Linus had been teetotal but Linus also had a tendency to start to shake at the end of a day of failures, and frequently had to take a prescription in order to sleep. Buffy sometimes wondered how long it had been since she had spent time with a whole and fully sane person. Giles seemed better off than a lot of them, but she was pretty sure that he wasn't one of those either.

"Good enough, I guess," she said calmly. She still thought it was a lot of fuss over dead bones, but Watcher superstition would not be argued with. She was tired, and as they were heading back out, she was wishing she'd brought a coat. Sunnydale nights at the beginning of December were cool and damp compared to how she remembered LA. "Let's just get this done. It's already been a hell of a day."

* * *

The matter of the bones took some hours. They were still laying on the floor of the factory where she had left them, the space hollow and echoing with complete abandonment. Giles barely spared a glance for the horrible machine the vamp king had had built. She was surprised at the single mindedness of his focus but then he hadn't seen it in use. They bundled the bones in a small blue tarp and put them into the trunk of Giles' funny space age car.

He took them out into the woods. They were a mild, tame woods, but it was a bit of a drive, and she was glad that her companion was a mild tempered, highly civilized man and that she was a Slayer. She had to take so much on trust in this business, in strange towns, with strange people. At least Giles drove competently and smelled okay, not like cigarettes or drink or unwashed demon fighter. She could tell he'd been doing magick recently but that was all.

Giles wanted the bones smashed, which she did with the flat of the shovel he'd brought. He did something that involved walking a slow circle around the small clearing and muttering. Wards, and good ones, a smell like hot copper in her nose. Every fine hair on her body rose. Reggie would be jealous of wards like this.

He built a fire and dumped the broken pieces into it. Then he fed it and prodded it until it burned hot and pale within its shallow-dug pit.

"This seems kind of excessive," she said, arms crossed and watching the proceedings with skepticism. For some reason the smell of the wood fire as it sparked to light had awakened in her a fierce appetite, but she had no food on her and she would not ask for handouts.

"I don't believe so," he answered and didn't elaborate.

While the fire burned, he taught her words to say. He didn't tell her what they meant, or even what language they were from, but none of that really mattered anyway. It was a prayer or a blessing or a seal, a good spell to ask for good things. She was to chant with him when the time came.

Buffy always felt silly chanting. Reggie believed that the wards and beseechings to old gods and rise-no-mores and protection spells were a necessary part of Watcher and Slayer life. She had trained as a Watcher during what she'd called a resurgence of the new-old age, when the better minds in the organization had decided that recent failings and waverings in the Slayer line over the last twenty odd years were the fault of over-scientific teaching and a turning away from tradition. Tradition was the one true faith of the Council, Buffy knew. The thing was, Reggie also didn't seem to believe in any of it. She did the rituals and lectured and bullied Buffy through them as well, but she treated it as a perfunctory annoyance, like keeping the official Diary or filling out field reports in triplicate. The results were poor and Buffy always ended up feeling like she'd been pushed into an embarrassing part in a school play.

This guy was a believer, she could tell that much. She learned the words. She didn't protest.

Buffy sat on the soft, dewy forest floor, several feet away from where Giles stood. She watched him watch the fire crack and flare. Their flashlights were off and it was now the depths of the night. Everything beyond the circle of firelight was deep, velvet black and featureless. Giles was a tall shape, shadowed and cast in sepia, and seemed locked in furious concentration even though this part was just waiting. He seemed suddenly austere, a deeply self contained force of energy, and perhaps only tenuously an ally. Alone in the woods, with this strange man and a long way til sunrise. She fidgeted, looped her arms over he knees.

"So that thing with the wish demon and the amulet," she said, challenging, "That was a bust, huh."

He turned sharply round to look down at her, as if just remembering her presence. Could he have forgotten she was there? She wasn't sure. With his back to the fire she couldn't read his expression. He was now an even darker shape, hands stuffed deep into pockets, his head and slouching shoulders edged around with faint goldenrod glow.

"I suppose you must be cold and bored out here," he said, ignoring her question, "I'm sorry. I have a clean blanket in the car, I ought to have thought to bring it. But now we can't step out of the wards. Not until it's done. Perhaps you'd like to come nearer to the fire…?"

"Sorry, I keep my distance from demon disposal fires," she said flatly.

"Sensible," said Giles, unoffended. "There was a girl in our little coalition, our little band, who liked to roast marshmallows when we had to set a pyre. I was never sure if it was an altogether sounds idea, but she and many of the others enjoyed it so much, I never had the heart to raise objections. They deserved a little fun. Willow was so young, you see. Oh lord, all of them were. When they started, anyway."

"How long?"

"hmm?"

"How long did that master guy run this place?"

"It will would have been three years, come next April. It's hard to say if that time feels longer or shorter. It's strange, I stand here watching these bones char and turn black, and even still I find it hard to believe that the demon and his network are gone."

Four months shy of three years, a long time for a vamp gang to run a town. A long time for a vamp gang to hang together, not tear itself up with infighting and destructive power plays fueled by demonic masculinity. Vampires tended to the stupid, vain, the selfish and impatient. They were instant gratification seekers whose more advanced plans were ruined more often than not by their ungovernability. When a gang started fracturing and fighting itself, it did a hell of a lot of damage to innocent bystanders, but they were easier to clean up. It had happened in Cleveland. Reggie had held them to stake outs and research for a month but then the intramural skirmishes began and Buffy'd had them mopped up in 48 hours of small fights and cornerings and stakings. She didn't think the supposed hellmouth there had amounted to much. But apparently Sunnydale was different. And apparently the bald, ugly, bulldogish thing she'd staked in a moment's unlikely coincidence had been different, too, stronger, more powerful. More enduring than most. She'd been lucky. It could have snapped her neck if that one of Giles' kids and the lesser vamp he was fighting had fallen another direction. She shivered with the near miss, feeling the reality of it. She thought about moving closer to the fire but didn't.

"There were five of them fighting for the good side in that warehouse," she said. It was habit to report to the nearest Watcher, the ordeal wasn't over without it. She should probably wait until she got a place to crash and call Reggie, but she would waste a lot of time yelling at Buffy about poor planning and failing to case the joint and what other little faux pas she'd committed while prioritizing saving people over procedure. This guy was an odd one, but he was there and he would care more about what happened to his people than about her bad planning. "They all made it out. Two of them went in ambulances, but it seemed more precautionary. Some civilians went down, but most of them got out."

"Who went to the hospital? Did you catch their names?"

"A short guy, really dark hair. He got banged up creating a diversion so the prisoners could get away. A tallish brunette girl who was casting some kind of spell. That Oz guy went with them, but he was fine."

"Jonathan and Amy. Well. I'm sure Oz would have called if it had been anything serious. The children have been through so much, I'm sure they needed some time to… To come to terms. Not that this isn't a wonderful development, but…"

"Amy? Not Willow of the marshmallows?" As far as Buffy could remember, there had only been one girl among the fighters earlier that night.

"No, not Willow. We lost her long ago. The Master kept her, turned her. The vampire who wore her face became one of his favorite disciples. She- it turned another of my little team…. They had best friends in life. Together as demons they were particularly inventive. It was… abhorrent. Still, none of us could manage to… put an end to it. If they are at peace now, I can only be grateful."

She fell silent. She knew her own losses too well. Nothing she said would change the facts. She knew they hadn't let any of the top minions get away. And she had no business prying into a stranger's grief.

"Why didn't you call for help sooner? Three years is a long time to let things go to shit."

"I did try. I am… a disgraced former watcher. Very disgraced. It was judged that I was lying or trying to trick them. Even my uncle would not back me. Their seers could not sense the hellmouth here, or the Master. The Codex which contained the prophecies of the Master was thought lost two centuries ago, and though it recently came to fall into my hands, the Council declined to believe that I had it, or that they were true. All that was left was to do what I could to protect this town and hope something might come along. Because of that poor girl who came here from the other reality two days ago, I had your name, and I was able to use my own resources to go around the Council and find you and your watcher. I was lucky, Regina and I overlapped for a year in training at the Academy so she was willing to trust me enough to send you. I'm not sure what the Council is going to say to you two about that, but I must say I can't regret the results."

"You went to Watcher school with Reggie?"

"Regina Talbott Pitcairn Burns lets you call her Reggie? She must have mellowed a great deal since the old days."

"'Lets' is a strong word. I don't know about lets."

"Ah. This begins to make more sense."

"But that woman is not a Regina. And I'm damned if I'm going to call her 'Ms Pitcairn-Burns' until one or both of us gets killed. Anyway, she started it. She only ever deigns to call me Elizabeth."

"I see. Well, that's only fair, I suppose."

"So. What did you do to make the Council hate you so much?"

He smiled that bland, public school smile, full of self depreciation and patience and shook his head. "Nothing that will hurt you here and now, don't worry," he said.

She felt patronized and nervous. She scowled and made a dismissive noise. She'd thought she'd been building a rapport of exchanged complaints about life on the line, the best way to make allies on long awkward nights - and the best way to check that everyone was who and what they'd said. Bitching about the bosses, the know-nots, the idiots with orders from on high, that's what she'd been aiming at. Instead, she'd tripped on something even more sensitive than vamped out high school students, a staggering feat if there ever was one, and he'd turned to her the polite equivalent of perfect blankness.

* * *

Buffy sat vigil. Eventually she did bow to stiffening muscles and the growing chill of inaction and moved nearer to the fire. She couldn't sense anything in the woods, nothing drawn to the fairly dramatic statement they were making with the hearty magicks and the bone-burning. The woods felt like the town had, charged, desolate, hollow. Three years was a long time for those people and animals who could to flee, or learn to hide. The were sitting in the scorched wake of an unnatural disaster. After a long stretch of silence and stretching her awareness as far as it would go, she accepted that there was nothing here to guard against. Her body was still on Chicago time, two hours ahead and primed for the soft unwinding after a night's patrol. She lay back against the ground, patchy long grass and moss, damp and cool with dew, and watched the occasional flake of glowing ash hit the barrier of the wards and extinguish, and drop. She wouldn't sleep, not out in the open like this, she never could. Sleep was too personal, too delicate, and too revealing. But she could rest, eyes on the changing, deep, unpolluted tones of the sky through the sparse trees.

When the fire burned low, as the fullest darkness of night had just begun to lighten again, Giles doused the flames with a jug of water from his duffle bag full of tricks. He waited for the smoke and steam to clear and then asked her to stand across from him over the charred pile and put out her hands for him to take. Then he had her say the first part of the blessing spell. His hands were hot around hers, the only warm thing, because as they spoke a cold, fierce breeze circled round them and every part of her felt touched with ice, electricity and ice. A heavy spell, saying the words made her tongue feel numbed, tingled in her skull, made her eyes go unfocused. There were never atmospherics when Reggie did these things.

When the first words were done, he let go of her, brisk and businesslike, and Buffy had to adjust her stance. Her legs felt badly overused. She missed the warmth of the fire.

She watched Giles with the shovel, breaking up the fire, turning the ashes under. She could have done it just as easily, Linus and Reggie both, maybe even Marrek probably would have passed it off to her - manual labor was the Slayer's purview after all. She didn't offer. She recognized the sharpness of this Watcher's movements, the determination in his set shoulders, the vicious thrust of the shovel-point. This man was furious, and fighting something that had hurt him. She knew it was a bad idea to get in the middle of something like that.

After that came more water from the plastic jug. "Distilled," he said, "Best to use the purest available when dealing with a magickal pyre. You never know what might…. React." Then blessed water from a large glass canning jar which he poured in a specific pattern she couldn't follow. Giles put out his hands again, which she took with more caution this time, and prompted her through the final phrases.

The wind didn't blow again, but Buffy still felt something drawn from her, a sense of motion or falling, as though they had spun around and around like the children's game, but they hadn't. Something distant and unknown snapped or let go with an echoing, almost inaudible crack. A stillness fell. She watched Giles tip his head up, as though scanning the sky, or else a gesture of relief.

Buffy took her hands back and wrapped them around her upper arms. She was shivering, deeply and internally. She recognized it as exhaustion, the end of her reserves.

"So," she asked, prompting, "That worked?"

"Yes. You couldn't feel it?" he asked, looking surprised.

She shrugged and looked away. Marrek hadn't had a chance to get into the magick much with her. Linus had many complicated, literate and precise arguments for why none of it was what they thought it was, he said things about personal strength of will and roving electricity and hypnagogic states, and how gods were myths and demons were only beasts after all, unusual kinds of animal. Reggie adhered strictly to the teachings from the COW, she took the accepted view as dubious but unavoidable fact. She said the words, but nothing happened. Buffy didn't like to dwell on any of it. Leave that stuff to the Watchers. It wasn't her area.

"Look, can get out of here already?" she said impatiently, tense and wrung out and tired of being left wrong-footed. "I'd already been awake forever when I staked the guy."

"Of course."

She was still shivering by the time they got back to the car. Giles pulled a blackwatch plaid blanket out of another duffle in the truck of his swoopy, space-bullet car and shook it free of imaginary dust and debris. She took it and rolled herself in it like a towel cape and climbed into the cushy back seat, curling onto her side. The bankette was plush and dry and leather-smelling, and deep enough that she could comfortably bend her knees without feeling she was about to fall off.

"I'm not sure," he protested, hovering nervously beyond the car door, "That doesn't seem entirely safe. There are seat belt laws in your country, you know."

"Look, it's at least an hour back to your dinky little town, and I've got to put my head down for a while. Your little magic trick was a doozy. You drive careful and I'll be fine. The roads are like, spooky deserted," she said, and tucked her spine up against the still sun-warmed leather of the seatback. There was a lap belt buckle under her hip but if she twisted a little she could avoid it without moving. "Close the door, would you?"

Giles gave a little humph but relented and shut the door. Maybe she should have asked if he was still okay to drive after that spell. But he hadn't seemed unsteady walking back. And it wasn't like she could offer to drive instead. Buffy had only gotten part of the way through learning how to drive way back when, at fifteen-and-a-half in the after school elective at Hemry in LA, before the Slayer thing hit her like a ton of bricks. Four years later, she'd only been put in charge of a vehicle a handful of times, and none of those instances had worked out terribly well.

She was pretty sure Giles wasn't going to fall apart before getting them back to town, anyway. What happened after that was anybody's guess, and whether she was going to be there to see it, she didn't yet know. She should go back. Buffy knew that's what Reggie expected. How it always worked. Demon dead, go back to base, make a report for the Diary, another day, another dollar. Not that the Council paid her. But she didn't want to. There was something unsettling about Sunnydale, and stupidly enough, she wanted to stay and poke it with a stick.

She wondered again what had happened with the amulet and the 'better world.' She hoped to god that Giles didn't think she'd delivered it by getting rid of his pest problem. She knew from personal experience that killing one vampire king did not do a hell of a lot to improve your lot in life.

Still chilled, she struggled with the blanket until she disappeared inside it, within a cocoon of fuzzy darkness, poking up just a little fold to breath through. The blanket smelled of clean, dry dust and faintly, incongruously of lavender. It made a stuffy, squeezing warmth, comforting and almost-personal.

She had gotten proficient, over the years, at making tiny corners in foreign places feel safe enough to be hers, just for the moment, for just as long as she absolutely needed. She closed her eyes, thought determinedly about nothing, and relaxed into the motion of the car.


	2. aftermath

**_I'm getting the feeling that my take on Wishverse may be kinda obscure, and specific... But I'm laying the groundwork now for bigger, more intimate, and more revealing things to come. It's felt really important to me to tackle the fact that Buffy and Giles in this universe *don't know each other yet* even though circumstance/curiosity/stubbornness has thrown them together. Please bear with me through the 'getting to know each other' phase, I felt like it wouldn't be fair or honest to skip straight past all that. I'm working on it, I promise._**

* * *

The girl slept in the back seat all the way back into town. Dawn came as he drove, thin, golden and blue-black with the hard sharp edged shadows and endless, bottomless sky he'd come to associate with morning in south central California. Daylight meant that the curfew was lifted. It meant he could finally feed and find lodging for his new young charge. It meant he could go to the hospital and visit Jonathan and Amy, and hear Oz's version of the Master's end. Buffy hadn't told him much about it, he realized, not that he'd not exactly been in a frame of mind to hear it. It also meant that by societies regularized clock, it was now 'too early' for a drink, even though he wanted one, or several.

He'd thought he'd left those sorts of tendencies behind in his twenties, but he also never expected spend nearly three years in a place violently under demonic siege. Not as he was, disgraced, renounced, a voluntary dissenter and the forcibly ejected both at once. No support, no hope of relief. It had looked for a time as though he and the others would hold the line until all of them were gone, and then the dominoes would begin to fall further abroad until someone from the Council noticed and cared. He hadn't been able to guess what it would take. A string of towns under threat, maybe even Los Angeles. He didn't know. He couldn't guess. Even when he'd turned from the Council, he'd expected them to still care about the thousands of civilian souls living in any town under threat. He had been wrong.

He argued with himself regularly, especially after reading the news, or coming home from a funeral for one of the children at the school, which seemed to happen every few months. He asked himself if the Council would have listened to his warnings, if had remained among their number. Would he, and they, have been able to stop the Master rising, the Hellmouth seal unseating itself. If people would have been saved. If Xander, if Willow, if Jesse and Owen and Theresa…. If the children would all have lived? Or would it have been the same? If he hadn't gone to Sunnydale on his own harebrained scheme he never would have been in place to see the prophecies, after all. It was an unproductive argument that lead him nowhere.

But that was done now, that was all done. The Master was dead and his rats-nest of compatriots rooted out. By the strange, sullen young woman sleeping behind him.

He drove a few wide loops around the town, giving himself time to unwind, and to let the poor, exhausted girl sleep, and to give time for something besides the Denny's to open their doors. The streets were becoming less empty, at last. He drove past the usual spots, braced with a sick weight in his gut, but there were no parting grisly displays. The siege was over. He spotted a big, lumbering yellow school bus hulking its way toward the residential side of town, empty and ready. It still astonished him that so many families had stayed, but from what he'd heard, many parents were unwilling to believe, or had been unable to afford the necessity of abandoning an unsaleable house and buying a new one in another town.

He took the Slayer to the Toast Point, the only place in town that did a decent breakfast and a not altogether horrible pot of tea. She was a taciturn meal partner, but tidy and polite, not the perpetually starving, meat-craving creature he'd been taught a Slayer was. She had ordered oatmeal with raisins and coffee with cream. He ordered an omelette and wheat toast, though he couldn't tell in all honesty if he was hungry or not. Georgia, the pretty, dark haired waitress who flirted with him through his first six months as a regular before she realized he wasn't going to take up the offer, gave openly curious looks to both of them, but especially to the sullen blonde girl with the messy braid. Buffy stared her down in a show of easy dominance.

"What are your plans?" he asked, capturing her attention back from intimidating the waitress, "Back to Chicago now? Or will you stay for a bit and investigate the, um, local flora and fauna?"

"I dunno. This was gonna to be a one-off, but there's something freaky about this place. It's like there's something else I'm supposed deal with here. I think I need to stay and see what. If there really is something, I guess." Buffy was frowning down at her oatmeal as if embarrassed by her confusion. "Anyway, I bet Reggie won't mind having a break from me for a while."

"Yes, I must say I'm a bit surprised that your Watcher doesn't travel with you. That's not the protocol I was taught, and I don't believe it's what Regina was taught either."

"Times change," said Buffy with a brisk, bristling look, "I can handle working without a minder. I'm not some naive kid."

"No, I can see that. In any event, I should be glad of the assistance. I'm not at all sure what's going to happen to the balance of power around here, in the aftermath. And I believe our little team is at the very end of its resources."

"I'll need a place to stay. You have any thoughts about that, Giles?" this was a challenge, a goad, but of course also a serious question.

"There aren't a lot of options, I'm afraid, with the way the tourist trade dried up these last few years, but there are a couple of motels. Or you're welcome to stay with me, if you feel comfortable with the idea. They often do, our little band I mean. The flat has become something of a headquarters away from headquarters. Which I supposed is why it's often something of a tip, but it's comfortable enough."

The girl, Buffy watches him. He can feel the weight of her assessment, her skepticism, the assumptions that she is trying to make or unmake about middle aged men who offer to house young women.

It is quite true that nearly all of his team have stayed with him at one time or another, even the other adults of their number, sometimes in groups and sometimes singly, and all wholly platonically. At least in his part. He wasn't always sure what the kids got up to when the rest were asleep, and as it isn't his business, he never tried to find out. It had been war, or siege, or hell. Sometimes it wasn't feasible to move if their work stretched past nightfall. Sometimes there was an emergency. Sometimes none of them wanted to face another night after a death announcement alone with their memories. Xander used to stay often, the start of the habit. Oz, too, after full moons in the library cage. Amy, too, after her mother ran off without a word. He was their head of house, their camp counselor as Jonathan put it. He didn't mind, he knew that even though he sometimes felt rather claustrophobically surrounded, it was better to have the company.

He thinks of all of this while she deliberated, and decided that trying to explain would do no good. This young woman has not been shown much kindness, he can tell. She would likely struggle to believe in gestures without ulterior motivation.

"Okay," she said, forcedly casual, "I guess I'll stay with you. Just because Reggie didn't send me with a lot funds. So we're clear."

"Alright. I understand. And if you would rather stay elsewhere, I can certainly afford to put you up."

"No. Your my ride here, right? And like, my watcher in situ. If you don't mind a couch surfer, it's fine."

"Certainly. I'm well used to it by now." He said blandly.

"Fine."

'In situ' was a surprising phrase from this rough, half feral Slayer. Though perhaps not, once he thought about it. Her main companionship these last few years of her tenure were likely to have been her Watcher. Or Watchers, rather, he assumed from the brief conversation he'd had with Regina. And he knew intimately well what Watchers were like.

"Are you going to let Regina know your plans to stay?" he asked. He wondered how formally he would end up responsible for her. He felt the urge to warn Buffy that the Council would likely take against any lengthy association between her and him, informal or otherwise. He guessed that she was contrary enough that such a warning would be as good as push towards open defiance from her. While he didn't disagree on principle with angering the council, her dependent position was far more precarious than his.

"Yeah," said Buffy, "But not right now."

He accepted this with the doubt that it was quite obviously due, but decided not to comment. What he remembered of Regina Pitcairn Burns from the old days was an abrasive, even batteringly determined young woman who seemed to believe that her capacious memory quick instinct for strategy were the same thing as infallible correctness in all situations. She was widely admired by the instructors and widely hated by her fellow trainees, which had only augmented her sense of being in the only right voice in a chorus of wrong-headed doubters. With Buffy's obvious fury and cynicism right in front of him, he could only imagine the explosive working relationship that Watcher and Slayer enjoyed, or failed to.

In the light of day, the flat looked particularly shambleized. He hadn't even bothered to put away the summoning spell ingredients from the night before. Housekeeping had fallen to low priority, recently, and this hadn't bothered him. Looked at now the haphazard piles of books and papers on every available surface, the abandoned tea cups and crumb strewn plates, the abandoned ceremonial bowl and burnt offering, acrid herbaceous smell still lingering, the spilled papers still littered across the floor, none of it was a welcoming sight. It did not look like an appropriate place to house a Slayer.

"Well. Sorry about the state of the place. It's gotten away from me lately. Let me just…" he gestured widely at the disarray and set off to make a dent in it. The crockery could be taken away at least, and the spellcraft materials put back in their cupboard, the papers gathered and set aside. He moved stacks of books off the coffee table and the dining table, and found that he had nowhere else to put them, so they joined other stacks in dark corners and on the margins of the staircase. "When the Library at the school isn't a possibility, we all come here, you see. Research and regrouping. And even a group of highly responsible teachers and young people can make, it turns out, an enormous amount of mess," he said, as he gathered up and disposed of forgotten trash from the last meeting, which he found on various end tables.

"It's not that bad," said Buffy, "I've seen worse."

She had gravitated to the sofa and the television propped up beside the hearth and was flipping through channels. So she's a teenager after all, he thought, not unkindly.

Upstairs, he quickly stripped the bed and put on fresh, clean white sheets from the blanket chest, and got the spare pillows out of the bottom of the armoire. He tidied up his abandoned water glasses and mugs of tea from the bedside table, and made a quick glance around to be sure that the small, blue and yellow tiled bath off the loft was presentable. It wasn't in his nature or his upbringing to leave any woman to the unevenly sprung mercies of the sofa, and this was an even more deserving guest who had earned more from him than sheer habitual politeness. For however long she stayed, he hoped to make her comfortable. He, all of them, owed her a very great debt.

He glanced down at the girl from the loft balcony, a slight, lounging figure, a sleek, golden crown. He thought, as he had intermittently every since the others began staying with him, that it was awkward that the bedroom didn't have any real privacy from rooms below. It made things complicated and jarringly fastidious with female guests. Yet, conversely, it helped, too. The openness of the loft gave it the communal feeling that made the friendly, chaste, often necessary 'camping out' in the flat so possible.

The feeling of openness and exposure was actually rather repressive to even private moments of romance, he had discovered in the early days with sweet, strange Jenny. She had complained of feeling on display, even with the lights low and the doors locked - those being the days before constant expectation of crashing emergency. She had appreciated it though, later and in a different context, when they often enough had one or more of the kids caught by curfew dozing below. She had liked the proprietary den mother sense of his and her watchful resting above, clothed and listening and luxuriating, the maternal figure and the paternal figure of the troop. She liked to walk up to the balcony and look down at them when they visited, peacefully settled and safe. Usually it was Xander, usually Willow and Xander, the most determined of their number, and the most without comfort at their own homes.

He'd found it cloying at the time, or something like that. Something that unsettled him, anyway. He had said something pointed and worried once to Jenny about playing happy families in the middle of a war zone. Jenny had looked at him with clear disappointment and told him that maybe that's when they needed it most. He later spent a lot of time wishing away his past reserve, but of course by then it had been too late.

The flat is cozy, ensconced in thick walls and creamy plaster, sunk within a walled and trellissed and gated, and palm and lemon tree shaded courtyard. One must know it's there to come to it, and once inside one feels welcomed and separated, like within an artistic retreat or a grand monk's cell. When he first decided to purchase it, it seemed not like a bachelor pad in the rank sense but like a place he could picture spending time in solitary contemplation, away from the jarring prospect of the High School, and the frightful possibility of a mystical convergence zone. None of that had worked out as he had pictured but the little place did feel secure, and now very well lived in.

He showed Buffy around the flat, the tidied loft that where she was free to rest, the kitchen, the big bath in the back, the weapons chest by the door if she should need it. Then he left her to it, with her small battered backpack and instructions to rest or to make herself at home. He desperately needed some time away from the close, familiar place, and from the stranger he'd been made to host.

He was grateful. They had been freed from the demon tyrant. He didn't feel freed. He felt tremendous pressure solidify around him, like a front of weather pushing him down, but also from the inside, pushing on his ribs.

* * *

Buffy intended to stay for a while, it was clear. She stewed the things from her bag across his bed. She poked around in his pantry and his bookshelves and his weapons chest. She did hours-long patrols of the whole town, as far as he could tell. She would slip in quietly in the small hours of the morning, smelling of night air and damp turf and sweat and creep past his couch to shower, and then back past him up to the loft. She used his shampoo. She tended to leave damp towels wadded in the sink. She always slept late. She didn't grocery shop for herself, but added things to the list on his fridge, like pop tarts and sugary breakfast cereals and low fat yogurt cups (no fruit at the bottom style, she wrote, he would have told her that she was more likely to get what she wanted if she did the shopping herself or at least went along, but she was asleep in the loft when he left for the school in the mornings and he still was in the habit of doing the errands below coming home in the evenings, while it was still light). She claimed that she had alerted Regina and obtained her permission to remain in Sunnydale, but he harbored doubts. Giles felt sure that the situation could not go on very long the way it was, it simply could not.

That first day after the Master was slain, he visited Jonathan and Amy in the hospital. Oz was still there, and Jonathan's small, round, teary eyed mother.

Amy had been bitten but she had staked her attacker quickly and the blood loss hadn't been bad. She would be discharged that day or the next, they had merely wanted to keep an eye on her. She sat upright in bed and spoke to him bravely about the final battle while Oz held her hand. She had been waiting, it seemed, for him to show up so she could talk about it, expiating triumph and fear.

She said that now that it was all over at last, maybe she would go away for college after all. Amy confessed that she had only taken UC Sunnydale's acceptance because she couldn't imagine abandoning them to the fight, but there had been other options, other schools. In places that weren't full of ghosts, she didn't say, but the three of them looked at each other and thought it, feeling those ghosts around them. Giles promised to help her get her transfer in any way he could, if there's what she decided on when the time came.

In Jonathan's room things were more quiet, more tense. He had been hurt fairly badly and was subdued and slightly sedated. Giles made small talk with Donna, his mother, in the room with Jonathan and then she asked to speak to him in the hall. She said that she knew, she knew something was wrong with this town. She knew her her son was a good boy. He was loyal to his friends. He wanted to protect them. She just wished that he would stop, stop getting in fights, stop staying out at all hours, stop hanging on to Amy and Oz because they loved each other, not Jonny, and to them he would never quite come first.

"It's going to be different now," Giles assured Donna, "Things have changed. I have- that is, you should trust that there's every reason to think that things will be much safer. For all of us."

He said also that Jonathan was a young man now, and an honorable one with friends who looked out for him. That was something to be proud of, and that he personally was very proud of the boy.

He thought involuntarily of Xander, of whom he had thought and said similar things. That he'd had friends who loved him, that he'd been loyal and honorable, that he, Giles, was proud. Giles meant those words equally for both boys. He was glad that he was not saying them to Jonathan's mother at a funeral. Maybe he could convince Jonathan to move on as well, now that the Master's rule was over, and then he would be safe enough that Giles would never have to.

After the hospital, he remembered his other duties, and phoned the school.

He notified the front desk of his absence, called it due to illness, and left messages for the two other teachers in the circle, Jenny Callander, who was very cool to him these days, and Dr. David Gregory of Biology who had turned out to be an steadfast ally after Giles had saved him from a giant praying mantis creature three and a half years before. He sent out a coded all clear and indicated that it was time for the whole group of survivors to meet, the next day after school. The defense club, it's euphemistic name, was called to meet in the Library after last bell, very important. Jenny and David knew how to contact all the graduated students who still helped out and the ones who were still in school would see the notice on the appropriate cork board. Candie, the improbably named woman at the front desk, had never been very warm or sympathetic to him, but she did have a fair idea of what was going on. She asked if it was good news. Giles said that it was, the best, he hoped the very best.

When he got back home that evening, after a long time spent in thought, trying to absorb all that had happened, Buffy was awake. Hadn't been sure if she had slept, or simply waited out the hours, but he guessed she had. She looked younger than she had the day before. Her face was less of a stiff mask, glaring and more a wary alertness. She was rather pretty, he realized, with some surprise. She had a sweet, germanic round face and big blue-green eyes and a mobile little mouth, and a healthy rose bloom on her cheeks. When she didn't glower she looked alarmingly young and doll like, or like a dreamy eyed, tender girl in a 16th or 17th century Dutch portrait. He had enough sense to realize that this was likely at least part of why she did glower so solidly, in awareness and defense against the impression of the sweet, wholesome smallness of her.

Buffy wanted to know about the hellmouth. She asked to see it, if it was a specific place that you could go look at. She said that the Cleveland one wasn't actually a place, and it hadn't impressed her. All hype and no follow through, she said. But it felt different here.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I'm being a very poor host. I left you alone all day, I should have asked…" he had known when he left her that he should have, but she needed her rest, and he hadn't been able to face playing tour guide, not yet.

"I napped," she said, cool and indifferent, "It's fine."

"But I think I must disappoint you tonight. I'm exhausted, I'm afraid. I'll make dinner and then I need to rest. I don't believe I'm safe to patrol just now."

"So it is a place that you can go to? Not just a supposed invisible whammy on the city?" Buffy asked, doggedly curious.

"Actually I'd say it's both of those. And you can't exactly go _to_ the hellmouth, but I can show you the place where it opens, if and when it does. Thankfully it is currently sealed. Not much to look at when it is closed, but as I say, I'm extremely grateful that that's the case, and may it ever be so."

"Okay. Tomorrow then," she said, looking faintly annoyed but her voice was calm enough.

She offered to go get dinner out somewhere and save him the bother, and Giles had to explain that there was a sundown curfew, started six months before. It wasn't likely to be lifted immediately because the people who had set the precautions hadn't understood what was going on, exactly, and weren't likely to understand what _wasn't_ going right away, either. It made patrol difficult, if the SPD was also patrolling. It also meant that stores and restaurants didn't stay open. Going out to lunch had replaced going out to dinner for the young and dating crowd, according to Amy.

"This is a hell of a screwed up town," said Buffy, absorbing this with distaste.

"Yes, I would have to agree."

Buffy went out to patrol after dinner, promising she knew how to duck cops if need be. He thought things were likely to be unusually quiet for a while, in the wake of the Master's demise, but she argued that there were always scavengers. She said that she was wired, she wanted to fight something.

She offered with an awkward and gruff politeness to take the couch later, she didn't mind. He got the sense that she was not altogether comfortable staying with him. Buffy would probably rather stay in a motel, independant and secure. He wondered why she didn't ring up her Watcher and request the funds to do so. He wondered why she was so intent on staying on with him, where she obviously didn't feel quite welcome, in a town she clearly didn't like rather than going home to Watcher where she wouldn't have to deal with either.

"Of course not, the loft is yours for as long as you have need of it," he said with a graciousness he didn't entirely feel, "I still have my manners, if nothing else."

A time would come, not long from that first night, when he would begin to regret that offer.

* * *

Buffy was distinctly unimpressed with the location of the hellmouth.

"This is a high school," she said when he went to meet in the Sunnydale High parking lot. The gathering would begin shortly.

Buffy was dressed more casually than her battle gear from the day before, an oversized plaid shirt and some kind of black undershirt and trousers. Her long hair was tied up in a heavy looking looped up, gleaming knot at the back of her head. Her face was fresh and clean and unmade up, and once again set with challenging skepticism. She looked convincingly like one of the ordinary students, even the conscious cynicism simply added veracity.

"Yes it is. Come on, I'll escort you."

"I thought we were going to look at a mystical convergence, not playing 'take your Slayer to work day.'"

"We _are_ going to look at it," he said shortly, "I did tell you there wasn't much to see while it's safely closed."

He led her to the Library from the side entrance, avoiding most of the busiest places in the school, and most particularly the front office window. He held open one of the swinging double doors for her, and pointed out the patch of floor beside the study table that had been cracked open when the Master rose and later repaired.

"You're kidding me," she said, peering at the floor.

"I assure you, I am not."

She stomped a combat booted foot on one of the obviously replaced boards, and then shuffled over the area. When this apparently yielded no information, she sat down on the floor and hovered her hands over the spot, frowning with fierce concentration. She sat in near spell-cast silence for a long, thinking stretch and then shrugged, and got back to her feet.

"Okay, yeah, there's something. It doesn't exactly scream 'vortex of cataclysmic evil' but it's not friendly, either." Buffy seated herself on the edge of the study table and leaned back on her palms, staring around at the rest of the library. "They really built a fucking high school on top of the mouth to hell."

"Yes, they did."

"And you just happened to get a job here."

"I didn't just happen to, I had a tip from... a friend who had convincing reason to know. That there was an unattended convergence, and that there was a position open for a Librarian at the school. It seemed appropriately unassuming. Though I did waste months looking for the particular spot when it turned out to be right under my nose. Convenient, in a way."

"Not convenient," she said, refusing to joke, "Creepy. I don't see how you can work here."

"I didn't think I could either, just after we found out. But you get you get use to it," he said, thoughtful, painful, tinged with recollection of things that even more be didn't want to confront. He put his hands in his pockets and blinked hard. "One thing I've learned is that people can get used to all kinds of things, with time and necessity."

Buffy stared hard at him from her perch. Her expression was surprisingly soft, he was tempted to call it sympathy. Or recognition, he thought, as she nodded slowly.

"I should make tea before the meeting," he said forcibly lifting himself from the growing mood they were sinking into, "come in to the office, you can pick out what kind."


End file.
